Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Re: [Ethereal-cvs] cvs commit: ethereal/gtk menu.c
Guy Harris wrote:
On Tue, May 04, 2004 at 10:08:20AM +0200, Ulf Lamping wrote:
The reason I put the "Coloring Rules" in the view menu is that it will
make it much more intuitive, that the coloring will only change the
view, and not the decoding of the data itself.
Well, that item also has stuff to import and export coloring rules,
which isn't really relevant to the view
Coloring rules are *only* relevant to the view, their relevant to
*nothing* else! Why do you think that saving of the coloring rules
shouldn't be relevant to the View?
- and note that some preference
settings also change only the view.
That's because there is no better way to put them into, and not a good
explanation to put everything else there too.
Please have a look at the GNOME HIG for the explanations of the toplevel
menu items.
I come to the conclusion, that the Preferences (a collection of lot's of
different things) is put there, as no better place is available. As for
the "Coloring Rules" a better place *is* available, so this is no good
explanation to put it into the View menu item IMHO.
Not every item where you can edit something must be placed into the Edit
menu!
Again, with that argumentation you could place *every* item with a save
button into the Edit menu (why not put the Capture Filters into the Edit
menu?). This was the case before I was starting to rearrange the menu
items, all this kinds of items where placed in the View menu near the
Preferences. Resulting was, it was *very* hard to start getting an idea
what the specific things will be doing and what they are related to.
The "Save" button saves the current coloring rules as default coloring
rules. One might have a set of default coloring rules and then set up
some other rules for a particular capture; perhaps there should be "Edit
-> Default Coloring Rules", which is always active and acts on the saved
coloring rules (and, in fact, could immediately act on those rules,
without having a "Save" button), and "View -> Color Packets", which just
affects the current rules, not the saved default rules.
... becoming a complete usability nightmare IMHO :-(
The GNOME HIG suggest the instant apply pardigma, as this is *much*
easier to understand, than the current "Ok/Apply/Save/Cancel" buttons in
many of our todays dialogs. For a user familiar with the instant apply
paradigma , even our current working model is a PITA!
I just want to repeat the opinions of a *lot* of the people I talked to,
telling me that the current menu (and it's functions) is much better
understandable than it was quite a while before.
Regards, ULFL
